WRITIN’ IS FIGHTIN’

Why I Won’t Be Attending the PEN Galapalooza

Salman Rushdie used a not-very-nice word to describe the boycotting authors.

By Rommel Demano/Getty Images

I, too, am boycotting the PEN Gala.

Not because of the Charlie Hebdo ruckus, which has divided normally sedate and contemplative belletrists into rival samurai gangs, glaring at each other with eyebrows ablaze, but because—have you ever been to a gala? They go on forever. Columbo could solve two cases in the time it takes from the preliminary milling-around reception phase to the groggy staggering to the exits on creaky legs after three hours or so of sitting at a table and applauding so many times for so many people and sentiments that your hands begin to clap on their own with no signal from whatever part of the brain that activates public acknowledgement.

And gala awards events are often fishy because the honorees are often high-profile figures who are in the trophy-case phase of their careers, doing a final victory lap around the stadium (think of Philip Roth), or trendy phenoms doted upon by the culturati, because those are the names that will draw donors and press attention and ensure that the event isn’t a B-level bust. So although I understand that every institution feels obliged to give Elie Wiesel an award so that he’ll intone his usual sonorities, I did think it was a stretch a few years back when the Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement was bestowed upon Wiesel, a writer who couldn’t be more dissimilar in tone, prose quality, and attitude from Mailer. Joyce Carol Oates, the previous year's lifetime achiever, at least shared a boxing fascination with Stormin’ Norman, which made them in some degree sympatico spirits. Still, it's a long sit.

But such awards, deserved or not, nearly always target the same exclusive circle of familiar worthies, making one’s misgivings or groans fall under the realm of personal taste and fatigue. I may feel that Toni Morrison has received enough awards and honorary degrees to last all of us several karmic lifetimes, but I understand why institutions consider her a prestigious safe bet to add another one to her Wikipedia page.

PEN American Center’s decision to give the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and its surviving editors and artists the mouthfully PEN 2015/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award at next Tuesday’s event falls far out of that comfort range. It was a bold choice that has proven far more decisive than it seemed at first announcement, creating the biggest stir since then PEN president Norman Mailer invited Secretary of State George Shultz to speak and found himself fending off a mutiny among the members.

Francine Prose, a former president of PEN American Center who had agreed to be a literary table host for this year’s bash, expressed dismay over the decision, respecting Charlie Hebdo’s defiance and courage before and after the massacre of its staff carried out by Islamic terrorists while deploring much the actual work that flew under its rebel flag.

I was horrified by the tragic murders at the Charlie Hebdo office; I
have nothing but sympathy for the victims and survivors. I abhor
censorship of every kind and I despise the use of violence as a means
of enforcing silence. I believe that Charlie Hebdo has every right to
publish whatever they wish.

But that is not the same as feeling that Charlie Hebdo deserves an
award. As a friend wrote me: the First Amendment guarantees the right
of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, but we don’t give them
an award.

What about the racist chapters of SAE and other fraternities right
here in our own country? I would say that they meet the criteria. We
have our own reviled population, under constant threat of police
brutality, prison and the like. So, are our racist fraternities not
equally deserving of the Award? We are PEN America after all, not PEN
France, and the fraternity brothers have expressed their views—even
in humorous (to them) song—with great clarity and force.

Like Prose, Eisenberg drew a distinction between the raucous integrity of the Charlie Hebdo staff and the use to which that pirate integrity was put.

I don’t doubt that the Charlie Hebdo staff is, and was, entirely
sincere in its anarchic expressions of principled disdain toward
organized religion. But although the magazine apparently disdains all
organized religion, certain expressions of anti-Semitism are illegal
in France, so Judaism is out of bounds for satire. In fact, the author
of a purported anti-Semitic slur in a 2008 Charlie Hebdo column was
fired. Therefore, in pursuing its goal of inclusive mockery of large
organized religions, at least those that have a conspicuous presence
in France, Charlie Hebdo has been more or less confined to Catholicism
and Islam.

But those two religions hold very different positions in France, as
well as in most of the Western world. Catholicism, in its most
regrettable European roles, has represented centuries of authoritarian
repressiveness and the abuse of power, whereas Islam, in modern
Europe, has represented a few decades of powerlessness and
disenfranchisement. So in a contemporary European context, satires of
Catholicism and satires of Islam do not balance out on a scale.

We also believe strongly in upholding and defending the role of satire
in free societies. Satire is, by definition, disrespectful and often
insulting. Based on Charlie Hebdo’s history, their statements and the
accounts of those within PEN who have personally known and worked with
the magazine, we believe that it sits firmly within the tradition of
French satire (see in particular).
They mocked religions, but also prejudices against religion, racial
prejudices, ethnocentric attitudes and a whole range of other targets:
Boko Harm, Brits, Jews (while I don’t know all the facts but I think
the incident you described did happen, but they also published other
cartoons targeting Jews. Including quite a few by Stephane
Charbonnier, the murdered Hebdo editor), gays etc. They defined their
role as pushing boundaries, questioning orthodoxy, casting light on
obscured motives and ensuring that nothing was above comment or
debate.

Being the wishy-washy liberal that I am behind this manly English Leather exterior, I see both sides of the argument and find myself somewhere in the mushy middle, believing that Charlie Hebdo deserved an official salute for its gutsy sacrifice but that this particular award might not have been the way to go. Such equivocation is why you'll never see me commanding a nuclear submarine.

Not everyone behaved themselves with the reasoned decorum of Prose, Eisenberg, and Nossel. When The New York Times broke the news that six novelists were withdrawing as hosts from the PEN gala (Peter Carey’s explanation sounded particularly prissy), the novelist and fatwa survivor Salman Rushdie went into Goodfellas mode, execrating this batch of black-tie defectors as “pussies.”

Now, that wasn’t very nice. And yet I welcome such strokes of incivility, a throwback to the days when writers such as Mailer, Vidal, Buckley, Germaine Greer, Susan Sontag, Leslie A. Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald, and Mary McCarthy rhetorically rumbled as opposed to the pattycake practiced today in which no one wants to rock the Titanic lifeboat. Writin’ is fightin’, to quote Ishmael Reed, and strife is a sign of life; polite consensus a soft chokehold. And this is a battle over something important, not the usual culture-war skirmishing.

“Pussies” may not be the wisest epithet, but I’m more bothered by Rushdie’s use of the phrase “fellow travelers” to describe the Gala Six, a smear term no person of the left should use, given its McCarthyite connotations.

Anyway, it’s good to shake things up every once in awhile, it gets the social blood circulating, and if I were PEN America, I would seize the opportunity by the snake throat and live-stream the gala, which will now hold far more theatrical interest for ringside homebodies than it would have hitherto, or at least let C-SPAN give it the White House Correspondents’ Dinner treatment. That way I could DVR it and fast-forward through the boring bits, which isn’t yet possible to do in “real life.”

• Full disclosure department: I am a member of PEN, the winner of last year’s PEN Award in Criticism, attended other PEN events, and am a sympathetic supporter of the organization, my aversion to galas being strictly incidental.